is there a way to create kanji or other symbol based text fonts using blenders text object?
You just need to find an OpenType or Truetype Kanji font, then you can load it into Blender's text object, and paste in your Kanji messaging in Edit Mode. You'll have to do the translation part somewhere else though.

If you having issues getting it to work, it might be easier to set the text in another program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape and then importing the text as SVG file into blender.